J%ORG KNAPPEN writes:
 > Frank schrieb:
 >
 > > Yes i'm seriously thinking that splitting TS1 into say, TSA (adobe default) TSE
 > > (with expert set) and so on would be helpful to actually make sure that if you
 > > have a font that claims to be in some encoding it really has the glyphs of
 > > that encoding.
 >
 > I suggested making a TSA encoding for Adobe fonts years ago, but noone
 > undertook the work.

:-) why do this statement makes me smile? the point is really that all this
needs people and time, there is unfortunately a big gap between suggesting
something and finding people to do it or to do it yourself.

but i don't want to claim that my idea is original


 > > Similar T1 should then be expanded to have companion encodings which are
 > > used for fonts that do not have Ng etc.
 >
 > > The number of encodings wouldn't grow that much, but then you could
 > > really be sure that you get what you ask for and not just some square
 > > boxes in the output and some error messages from dvips.
 >
 > I'm afraid, the number of encodings will grow much. There are more
 > founderies than Adobe around (like Monotype, Linotype, Agfa, Berthold to
 > drop some names) and they all have different basic and expert glyph sets in
 > their fonts.  My font book from FontShop lists about 70 founderies, the new
 > edition probably has even more of them.

there is a difference however between a font encoding and an encoding provided
for, say, NFSS. You do not need to model all encodings as 1-1 NFSS encodings,
since you have to build vfs or at least tfms anyway you can ignore that some
font has a few additional glyphs. So if one would come up with an alternative
to T1, that could be implemented with many basic fonts that would already be a
big help

 > In addition, glyph sets aren't constant in time; older fonts lack the
 > Euro sign newer fonts have.
 >
 > Fonts are a real mess (not only with (La)TeX, but also with the so-called
 > professional versions for PC and Mac) and I don't see that the state of affairs
 > will change on foreseeable future.

yes sure, fonts are a mess (for any system) and you can't change that
fact. however we can make our lives somewhat more comfortable by not building
extra problems, and T1 was a mistake as it was designed with the world view of
"TeX lives in a world of its own and all it has to do is to provide a
wonderful font set which can typeset as many (latin based) languages as
possible and then all is perfect".

unfortunately less would be more now

 > IMHO, the black box replacements in vf's are an error: An unavailable glyph
 > should be unavailable in the tfm file as well and provoke a harsh TeX
 > error message. To catch the black thingies at proof reading stage is rather
 > late and error prone.

agreed
frank